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I think Mayawati is in many ways the likeliest person to become India's next Prime Minister. I see a fractious mandate being provided by the electorate in the next general election. I expect the regional leaders such as Jayalalitha and Mamta (not to mention Nitish Kumar, Naveen Patnaik, and Omar Farooq) to do well.

I am sure the ladies would love to support a female from the grassroots for the post of Prime Minster. It will be up to the big parties such as Congress and BJP to recognize people's mandate for what it is and perhaps choose to support a coalition of smaller parties at the center from outside.

This will of course reflect the reality of India's diversity where each state will have an individual voice in the running of the entire nation: a truly federal structure.

Mayawati has successfully Uttar Pradesh, one of the most complex Indian states. With this experience, she has shown that she is capable of engaging in the kind of deal-making that is essential to running In…

Sachi Mohanty

My favorite words at present: There are no lessons to be learnt, no
discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with
nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I
can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink
of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is
amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can
contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and
warmth, grabbing and giving — and also more particular opposites such as
a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success
amounting to smugness.

I think I am a born rebel or a subversive. I am definitely an atheist. I sometimes feel that in a country as suffocatingly religious as India, some of us have to go to the other extreme as a counterweight to all the religious blindness which is there.